Capacity Gain in Spread Spectrum Based Collaborative Communication in Wireless Sensor Networks

Even with imperfect phase and frequency synchronization, collaborative communication can mitigate the effect of fading and produce a significant gain in received power. This article investigates the benefits of spread spectrum based collaborative communication in the presence of noise and fading. A mathematical expression for calculating capacity gain is derived showing that the use of spread spectrum significantly suppresses the effect of noise and fading. The proposed model is analyzed as well as compared with the simulated results to gauge its performance. The results show that channel capacity behaves as a function of the number of collaborative nodes and channel parameters. It can be concluded that the use of collaborative communication in combination with spread spectrum reduces energy consumption leading to improvement in network capacity.